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For Russia and Belarus, the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will necessarily be synonymous with a neutral banner.
PARIS 2024 Olympic Games – End of suspense for Russian and Belarusian athletes. This Friday, December 8, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) finally took a position on the fate of athletes of Russian and Belarusian nationality who planned to take part in the next Olympic Games, organized in 2024 in Paris.
But rather than authorizing these athletes to compete for their country, the IOC preferred to authorize them to participate under a neutral banner, outside of team events and if they did not actively support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as the precise the IOC press release.
However, this status will ultimately only concern a small number of Russian and Belarusian athletes. In fact, only eleven “neutral individual athletes” have so far qualified for the competition, eight Russians and three Belarusians, the IOC said in a press release, against around sixty Ukrainian athletes.
Figures which can be explained by the large number of team qualifications in which these athletes can no longer take part due to the isolation of these two countries on the international scene.
No consensus yet
As a reminder, Russians and Belarusians were banned from world sport at the end of February 2022, following the start of the war in Ukraine. The IOC therefore reasoned in two stages to organize their return, explaining on numerous occasions that the athletes should not ” pay “ for the actions of their government.
Last March, the Olympic organization first recommended that international federations reinstate Russians and Belarusians under neutral banners in their competitions, while rejecting “at an appropriate time” its decision on the 2024 Paris Olympics as well as the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics.
The Olympic body then took the time to evaluate the progress of the competitions, judged to be generally satisfactory, and to see the position of the Ukrainian government evolve, which first required its athletes to boycott any event involving Russians before to soften its position this summer.
But the question is not yet completely resolved, like the 12th Olympic Summit organized Tuesday in Lausanne, which once again proved that the world of athletics was still very cautious about the idea of reintegrating Russian athletes at only a few months of the Paris Games.
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